Douglas Murray - Hamas has to lose the war and it has to know it (Pt.1)
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This is the bit of the equation that so few people have been willing to talk about. Yes, some people have been willing to talk about the victims, but why have we shied away from talking about the perpetrators and what actually motivates them? Why have we failed to really try to comprehend this cult of death?

Hello and welcome to State of a Nation. I'm Elon Levy. The October 7th war is a battle between a democracy and a death cult. Between the democratic state of Israel fighting for its life and the jihadi regime of Hamas fighting for its next act of genocide.

That should be obvious. But apparently it's not. Not if you're looking at the massive pro-Hamas rallies in London and New York. Not if you're watching the madness on Western university campuses, where mobs are chanting for intifada and terrorism in the name of justice. And not if you're following the international organizations bending over backwards to save Hamas from the war that it started, demanding a ceasefire that would leave it alive to murder again.

So you'd be forgiven for asking, who are the democracies in all of this? And who are the death cults? Because when you see Western institutions rallying to defend an Islamist regime that burns families alive, when you hear people in free societies celebrating that kind of evil, you have to wonder whether Hamas is the only death cult we're dealing with, or whether parts of Western societies have become one too.

And that brings me to today's conversation, one I have been looking forward to for a very long time. I'm joined again today by my friend Douglas Murray, writer, thinker, public intellectual, and I have to say something of a national hero here in Israel since the start of the war, and I don't use that phrase lightly.

Douglas has done something that very few commentators in the West have managed since October 7th. He's cut through the noise with unflinching honesty, with moral clarity. He said out loud what so many Israelis feel but struggle to articulate to the world: that Israel is not fighting for itself alone. It is fighting for the entire free world. And far too many in the West have failed that basic test of decency.

In his new book on democracies and death cults, Douglas lays out what may be the central argument of our time, that we're in a civilizational struggle between societies that cherish life and those that worship death. Between democracies, flawed, imperfect, but fundamentally decent, and death cults, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, that glorify murder and martyrdom.

And the battleground isn't just in Gaza or on the Lebanese border, it's also in the hearts and minds of the West. The book is out now, published by Broadside Books of HarperCollins. And if you're looking for moral clarity in a time of moral collapse, I can't recommend it highly enough. So in this special two-part conversation, Douglas and I are going to dive deep.

In part one, we're going to look at death cults, what they are, how they thrive, and why the West struggles to confront them. We'll talk about what Douglass saw and covered on the ground, embedded with IDF forces in Lebanon and Gaza, what he witnessed, what he learned, and what thoughts he left with after witnessing evil in the face.

And in part two, we'll look at democracies, at the repercussions of this war for the West, and what the West's reaction says about itself, about its strength, and about its survival. Let's get into it. Douglas Murray, welcome back to State of a Nation. It's very good to be with you again. There are two wars raging right now that are fateful for the West.

Israel and Ukraine. You've been covering both on the ground and I have to say in terms of the subtitle of the book, Israel and the Future of Civilization, one might think that the war in Ukraine is more fateful for the future of civilization because the threat is of Russian tanks rolling up right into the heart of Europe. So why having covered both of these wars, have you chosen to release your first book in the last few years on what you saw in Israel?

Well, several reasons. One is, of course, the nature of the conflict itself. As you say, I've covered both conflicts. I've been covering the conflict here in Israel and neighboring countries perhaps more closely and certainly spent more time here than I've been able to in Ukraine. I think several things really have stuck with me and made me want to write this. And I suppose it really comes down to one thing in particular, which is...

When Ukraine was invaded in 2022, most people, I put aside this sort of fringe, but most people had great sympathy with the Ukrainians. Whatever your criticisms of the conflict since or handling of it or much more.

People just generally in the West saw Russian tanks rolling into a nation and thought, well, we're not in favor of the Russian tanks. We're on the side, indeed, of Ukraine. And that first, just that initial reaction, never mind everything that's happened since, but just that initial reaction was pretty overwhelming, really.

Now, compare that to the reaction around the world when Israel was invaded on October the 7th. And, you know, I don't need to tell you or your listeners, but the reaction was not primarily one of sympathy for Israel. There were many people who were sympathetic to Israel, deeply troubled by what they saw.

But we also know that the initial response to the massacre was in the case of Israel to do that thing that we were told was not something you ought to do in this era, and that's to victim blame. It was to blame the victim of the massacre, to come out against the people who had suffered the massacre rather than the people who perpetrated it.

One of the things that was on my mind from the beginning, from the day after October 7th, was why are there no protests around the world against Hamas? Why are there protests already against Israel? In what other situation would a country be assaulted? Would its citizenry be murdered, mutilated, tortured, burned, raped? And so much of the world would...

Blame the victim. And for me, that has been, in the last year and a half, one of the questions I've just spent a lot of time thinking about and studying and observing firsthand. And it seems to me to get to one of the crux issues of our time, which is, are we still able to tell the difference between the victim and the perpetrator? Are we able to tell the difference between a firefighter and the fire?

Many people, I think, have failed that test. And that's the principal thing that I think is a challenge for people outside of the country we're currently sitting in. And that really brings you staring into the heart of darkness, not only when you come face to face with the atrocities that Hamas perpetrated...

But perhaps aspects of the dark soul of the West as well with that moral collapse and failure to understand the basic difference between a democracy and a death cult. Whatever criticism you're going to have about how a war is waged. And I want to linger on your definition of Hamas as a death cult because there's been a debate in your home country in Britain about how the BBC should refer to Hamas. Is it a militant group? Is it a terrorist group?

Is it an ebullient expression of social justice? Perhaps. I mean, Mr. Corbyn would think that it's a movement for peace and justice. But you define Hamas as a death cult. Why? It's got every single factor that you'd need to define it as such. It's not just...

a movement that desires death. It's one that glorifies death. It's one that seeks death, venerates death. It's a necrophilic cult. It not only wants death for its enemies, but glorifies in death for itself. I say at one point in the book that just look at the reaction of, for instance, a Hamas leader like Ismail Haniyeh,

when he learns that three of his sons, who are Hamas, have just been killed in Gaza. He doesn't mourn. He doesn't really seem to flinch. Now, of course, his admirers would say, what a wonderful trait that is. That's not a wonderful trait at all. It's a deathly trait. He's happy that his sons have died in what he would say would be the way of jihad. He offers up prayers of thanks to his god,

that his sons have died in their pursuit of death. That's something which we have seen throughout history, these necrophilic cults. But to have one in our own time, that's something which Israel and Israel's allies have had to deal with on the battlefield. Right, in particular, the...

hostage parades and the dead baby parades that Hamas put on were reminiscent of medieval public executions where people would gather around to see someone getting guillotined, that public spectacle. Oh, to see a crowd in Gaza jubilant at the sight of the coffins of Jewish babies being paraded. What more evidence do people need of this cult of death and what it's really encouraging?

among its members and among its supporters. And then you get that thing outside of Hamas, outside of that immediate environment, which is why so many people in the West want to throw their lot in with that.

And this is a deep challenge, I think, for people in free societies. Why in the West have we got so many people among us who glorify in this barbarism?

And there are answers to it, but there are answers that will be quite unpalatable for a lot of people. And those answers, I want to get onto that question in a moment because it's deeply disturbing. But the fact that Hamas is a death cult faces Israel with two problems. First of all, the strategic problem of how you fight a death cult on the battlefield.

It's one thing for Israel to say that Hamas is evil. Hamas wants the world to know that it is evil, and that is why it puts on the most grotesque hostage parades, the dead baby parades, to revel in its villainy. It weaponizes Israel's humanity against it by using human shields, deliberately building a network of tunnels inside homes and schools and hospitals and hiding rockets under children's beds.

It also makes it difficult to fight a war of public opinion when Hamas is so twisted and so depraved that in the West you have almost two audiences. Those who buy into...

who are enamored by this death cult, and we'll talk about why that happens, but also those who fail to understand that that is what Israel is truly up against, because evil isn't something that we talk about in the modern world. It really feels like it's something that's come from another time and place. And so I'm wondering, from your experiences on the ground here, right after October 7th, what did you witness? What are the stories that really linger with you? Are you understood?

I'm dealing with a different presence now. This is an evil from another time and almost another dimension, one might say.

Hey there, I'm Aviva Klompas. The news moves fast, and it's not easy to cut through the noise and understand what really matters. Okay guys, we gotta get off the roof. We're sorry to interrupt, we do now have... That's why twice a week I sit down with former Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Dr. Michael Oren, and other leading voices to dig beyond the headlines. It is happening fast. This is not something that's... Let us go back a 30,000 foot moment. Subscribe to Boundless Insights wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah, I gave a lecture recently in New York for New Criterion about the banality of Hannah Arendt's thought.

which one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because the phrase that Arendt famously came up with when covering the Eichmann trial, although she covered it for a matter of days, was this phrase that I think has polluted the language since, which is the banality of evil. People are very keen on using this phrase, and my argument has been... Well, it does make one sound pseudo-intellectual. It does. It does, for sure. And...

Arendt's phrase was, as I tried to show, totally unfit for purpose in describing Adolf Eichmann, who only fooled one person in the court, and unfortunately that was Hannah Arendt. But it also was strange because...

The popularity of this phrase is, I think, telling. People like to describe evil as banal because it's a kind of get-out in a way. Funnily enough, I mean, it's a slight misunderstanding of some people, even a misunderstanding of Arendt. But having your principal prism of understanding evil as saying it's banal

is a kind of get-out because actually most evil is very, very far from banal. It's visceral. It's there. It's one of the great forces of humankind. If you recognize that other human experiences exist, love, envy, jealousy, care, charity, and so on,

you should also concede the fact that there is a force that we need to call evil. My suggestion is we're not very good at dealing with that, perhaps because in our anti-theological times, we don't have the moral framework, because certainly a lot of people in the West don't have the moral framework or understanding framework

to describe things as evil. Which is funny you should say that because the side that is taking Hamas's side, I get the feeling, does believe in evil. It just thinks that Israel is evil. Yes, well, there is that. I mean, it makes it awfully easy for them in a way because they get to offload and project all of their problems onto this one small nation.

But as our mutual friend Mehdi Hassan would say, every accusation is a confession. Yeah, we'll get on to him maybe.

But I think this thing of understanding that there is such a force as evil in the world and sometimes it makes itself horribly manifest and that it made itself horribly manifest on October the 7th. Douglas Morey's new book makes the case for supporting Israel as a way to support the Western world, its history and its values.

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If you want to sponsor any episodes of State of a Nation, we would love to hear from you. Be in touch with me on social media, Elon A. Levy. We'd love to hear from you. Right, back to the conversation with Douglas Murray.

And, you know, I say at the opening of On Democracies and Death Cults, just take that phone call that has become quite famous since October 7th, that young Gazan man who calls his parents on the cell phone of a woman whose family he's just murdered, I think maybe even on his own phone. But he calls back to Gaza and he says to his parents, you know,

Your son's killed 10 Jews with his own hands. He's killed 10 Jews. Put mum on the phone. I want to boast to her. And the family back in Gaza are elated by this. And this was one of the things, from the moment I understood what had happened on the 7th, one of the things which I thought we really needed to think about and address, which is what is happening now?

with a society in which somebody is so proud of their evil that boasts to their family about their evil and says, put my brother on the phone. I want him to know that I've killed ten Jews with my own hands. And this wasn't a fluke. It wasn't a one-off. It was only a representative example of the evil we saw on October 7th. Absolutely. And that...

And of course, there are a lot of people in the West who, as I say, for theological or non-theological reasons, don't want to try to unveil what is beneath this.

But I think we have to do that and to say, you know, sometimes it's not just that somebody who perpetrates an act of evil like that is somebody who's been misunderstood or has not been educated well enough. Or has an economic grievance. Or has an economic grievance or something hasn't gone well enough for them in their life or they don't get everything they want. No. At some point, you've got to stop making excuses and...

You know, one of the things that I mention in the book but I think is really, really worth addressing is something that the great Ruth Wise, emeritus professor at Harvard, and as I said before, one of the only people who adds any lust to the name of that institution. Ruth Wise said on the anniversary of October 7th, you know, a lot of people said in the aftermath of the massacres, this is the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And that's true, of course.

But she, with her laser-sharp mind, had the ability to focus on the next bit of it. And she said, I don't like this being used. Because firstly, she said, it focuses primarily and perhaps necessarily on the victims. And she said, some people have had the courage to identify the victims of the 7th. But very few people in the West have had the ability to say...

Well, okay, so that's the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, in which case, who are the Nazis this time? And why have we got so many of their supporters among us? You see, even in the 1960s with the radical student movements in the West...

There was no large-scale movement that supported a group that sought the annihilation of the Jewish people like Hamas does. Even in the 1930s, it was not the case that we had large numbers of pro-genocide people in positions of power and influence in the West.

And the reason I mention this is because this is the bit of the equation that so few people have been willing to talk about. Yes, some people have been willing to talk about the victims, but why have we shied away from talking about the perpetrators and what actually motivates them? Why have we failed to really try to comprehend this cult of death?

Maybe because it is incomprehensible. Maybe because people in the West want to believe that ultimately we're all the same deep down and we all want the same thing, which is a good, prosperous life and to raise families in peace. And the notion that there are...

Death cults committed to a millenarian vision that operate on a different logic from our own is so difficult to comprehend. Hannah Arendt, in her book on the Eichmann trial, speaks of the banality of evil as if Eichmann was some low-grade bank clerk who didn't really understand what he was doing. Mm-hmm.

And you've spoken about why that didn't make sense even in the context of Eichmann. But you've actually come face to face with evil itself because as a journalist, you've been taken into Israeli prisons to see some of the October 7th monsters themselves. What did you see in their eyes? Did you see banality? I mean, it's one of the things I sort of thought from the beginning was I want to see these people if I can. How to describe them? Um...

I mean, these people are people who still want to die. They would love to take some Jews with them still, but all of them came into Israel on the 7th expecting to die. And that, as you say, is something that's incomprehensible to most people in the West. You know, we want to live and we want our families to live, our children to grow up and the world to get better, but...

But face to face with people who just don't agree with that vision, I suggest, among other things, is just a deep challenge to us. There's a sort of sub theme that I've noticed for some years now, which is naive Westerners who meet reality fast. And there was a case some years ago where I think a husband and wife or something from

like the Bay Area in San Francisco or something like this, decided to take their... give in their jobs and cycle around the world. And they kept a sort of... This is about 10 years ago or so now. They kept a kind of online blog of their travels. And they were...

They basically set out from America on the presumption that most people in the world are the same. We all want the same things. You know, it's wonderful how people can have such theories about the world despite never having visited it or perhaps because of never having visited it. But yes, you know, they were cycling through some of the stands and, you know, talking about how, you know, everyone they met, you know, wanted the same things as them. And then...

One day they were cycling along a road in one of the stands and a truckload of ISIS supporters drove past them, couldn't believe their luck, came back and killed them. And that's the sort of reality coming at you fast sort of thing. But we do tell ourselves in the West crazy stories about the rest of the world. And we have done, I would argue, and we've done that for a couple of centuries now,

How so? Well, a lot of people trace this intellectually back to Rousseau. And there's something in that, which is that, I mean, Rousseau had great theories about the rest of the world. Again, having never visited anyone further away than Switzerland.

He had an awful lot of views and the sort of Rousseauian worldview. He had some crazy ideas. Women are more fertile if they live up in the mountains. He had a lot of very odd theories about human nature. Yeah, not visited many women or many mountains. I mean, but the thing that really motivated Rousseau and motivates a lot of people today is...

They're not really interested in the rest of the world. What they're trying to do is to find a counterpoint to the society they're in in order to lambast the society they're in. Some years ago, I think it was when I was writing The War on the West, I realised this with Rousseau, that Rousseau wanted to critique the Paris of his time. And there was good reason to critique the Paris of his time. But what he did was to find a counterpoint in, you know, the sort of noble savage, effectively.

and to use this as the counterpoint to the Paris of his time. Now, that's the case with a lot of people today. A lot of people in America, Canada, Australia, Britain, Europe, want to critique the society they're in, and that's fine. That's as it should be. It's one of the things that makes liberal democracy fertile and important and interesting. But then there is this terrible error people can fall into, which is anything that stands in counterpoint

to the society I'm in, I will use as a way to critique the society I'm in. Now that's where a lot of people fall into error. You see, if you're a disgruntled person in the West who believes you don't have everything you want, you know, you might not be as socioeconomically advantaged as you'd like to be, you may not be finding a way up on the housing ladder, all sorts of things like that. Or you may be dissatisfied with the body you were born in or whatever.

there is this way to critique the society but then to say here is this other vision and I'll just grab it and use it against the society I'm in as a counterpoint

And again, sometimes you can do that. Sometimes that's quite useful to do. And in this instance, you think they're latching on to Hamas and Islamism as a counterpoint? Explain how that works in practice. Well, it works in practice when somebody finds themselves crapping outside whilst living in a tent in the center of an American university.

In order to show solidarity with Hamas. I mean, is it no more intellectually sophisticated than the enemy of my enemy is my friend? The West civilization is my enemy. Therefore, anyone else who is attacking that civilization, we must be on the same side. That's right. And also, of course, if you're brought up to believe that the society you're in is uniquely evil and bad.

then you'll probably grab any cudgel you can find to hit it. And there we find this strange paradox between, on the one hand, the people who are supporting Hamas not understanding its evil. On the other hand, perhaps they do think that evil is a presence in this world and they think that the West is that evil. There is a certain paradoxality here in Hamas

people who celebrate diversity, perhaps not understanding the true depth of what human diversity means and different systems of thought and understanding how other people genuinely understand the world in a radically different way. And that suicide is still a thing. Child sacrifice is still a thing. Yes. Yes, that's right. I mean, these are all things that we thought were left in the far distant past.

But as you say, I mean, like, you know, the scenes in Gaza of the handover of bodies and of living hostages. Perhaps when you define yourself as progressive and you believe in progress, it's difficult to believe that not the whole world has moved along at the same speed. That's for sure. And, I mean, progressives always have at their heart this big problem of, you know, everything is getting better except for, you know,

Very large exceptions. One of the great alleyways intellectually of recent years was created by Steven Pinker when he wrote his very, very interesting book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that might be summed up by saying we're just as a species getting nicer and nicer. I'm not sure the modern progressives think that the world is getting progressively better. My sense, my finger on the pulse tells me they think that everything's going to pot.

And that's the dominant zeitgeist now. Well, it's always an interesting, lazy thing to fall into for right and left, that. But the Pinker argument that we're just sort of getting better and nicer...

which I think is part of the progressive mindset, is we're going to fight for more and more rights, effectively. We've done a lot of stuff to get rights for minorities. We're going to find ever smaller minorities to get ever more rights for them and so on. That does remain quite a large, if not the main driving force of progressivism. But

The sort of hilarious problem about this theory is, you know, we've sort of been getting better and better, but you've got to have like an asterisk at the bottom of the page, say, except World War I and World War II, which is a heck of a footnote. And in fact, even Pinker and others, when they talk about, you know, the decline in violence, for instance, have to admit that what they cannot take into account is mass casualty violence.

So things like you can show that murder rates have gone down, but you've got to put into brackets, oh, and of course this doesn't take into account genocides, would-be genocides and much more. So it's a very unsatisfactory theory and a very unsatisfactory way of looking at the world. But it does have this big gap of maybe we're not getting better, maybe...

Maybe evil exists. Maybe, you know, just as people knitted by the guillotines during the French Revolution, so people can sip their lattes and eat a bag of Doritos whilst watching a death cult like Hamas do their work. And the march of progress is not indeed inexorable. I'm interested by the image that you used before of the noble savage going back to Rousseau. And I wonder, do you think perhaps Hamas...

is the noble savage of the modern progressive mindset. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Let's unpack that. That's an interesting thought. Yes, I mean, in the... I mean, for those who don't know, what role did the noble savage play in Western thinking before we understand how Hamas slots into... Well, it's primarily the idea that there are sort of people who are born innocent and who the outside world...

influences in such a way that they do bad things, but they do the bad things because we make them do so. Right.

Right, the Palestinians permanently absolved from any responsibility for their fate, infantilized, I think, in the most humiliating fashion that no one encourages them to say, you need to take responsibility and accept that this strategy of waging a forever war, forever jihad against Israel has brought disaster on you. You need to look reality in the eye and make difficult decisions. It's always Israel's fault. It's always the West's fault. There's that infantilization mentality

That is fascinating. Now, I never made the connection in my mind to think of how Hamas is perceived by large sections of progressive opinion as that noble savage. The Palestinians are children who can never do anything wrong. If they do something wrong, it is always someone else's fault. Someone made them do it. Someone made them do it. Well...

I mean, there's lots of things to unpack there. First of all, I'd say that this isn't just Israel. Israel happens to be at the forefront of this misunderstanding of our time. But it's not the only one. I mean, if you ask anyone on the sort of progressive side of politics why it is that, for instance, LGBT rights aren't all that great across much of Africa, you'll be told it's because of colonialism.

If European countries hadn't have brought colonial law to these countries in the 19th century, they'd all be havens for the gays and there'd be sort of heaven nightclub in every street. And that's just obviously ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. If you say, well, why are there 50-odd countries in the world, Muslim countries, which have extremely...

low tolerance rates, to put it mildly, for religious minorities, you will almost invariably be told it's something to do with colonialism. So this...

This misperception that only the West can do things and only the rest of the world suffers the consequences of this and anything bad about them must have come from the West, that's common across, I think, the world at the moment. But Israel is at the forefront of that because it's fighting for its survival as a nation.

and is sort of, for lots of reasons, is the eye of the storm. And I'm afraid these misconceptions that have run rampant in our time run most rampant in relation to Israel and the Jewish people and the, you know, you and I can do this in our sleep, but, I mean, if the...

If the Palestinians or the Arabs, if the Arabs had accepted a state, you know, in 1947, 1948, they'd have one. If they'd have accepted a state endless times since, they'd have one. I mean, you know, it would be another failed state, almost certainly, but they'd have a state.

And here we get to the tragedy of the infantilization of the Palestinians that, sure, some people would counter and say, well, it wouldn't be a state on all the land to which they're entitled or all the land they want. But we say, look, you are driving yourselves into disaster by waging this forever war against Israel in an attempt to get the ideal terms you're never going to get. Absolutely.

Because Israel is not a death cult and we're not about to commit suicide. And on the subject of you referring to Hamas as a death cult, it's a death cult in the sense that the special forces, the Nukbar forces who crossed into October 7th to murder, rape, burn people alive, were on a kamikaze mission. They expected they were going to die. But it's a death cult because it still practices child sacrifice because it took...

massive quantities of concrete to build a necropolis of tunnels underneath Gaza with the tunnel openings inside schools and homes and hospitals and even rockets stored under children's beds which are perhaps some of the more shocking evidence that the IDF released from Gaza and I know that many of the people around the world who've been protesting for Hamas are not going to be moved by any sort of sympathy for Jews or Israelis and we'll put to one side why that is but I do think they may still be moved and some appeal may be made to their broken conscience and

with what Hamas has done to Palestinians in Gaza.

So I wonder from your reporting, having been embedded with IDF forces inside Gaza, what did you see about the way that Hamas fights? Because remember, one of the questions I would often get asked is, look, we agree Israel has a right to fight, but the way that it fights matters. So I'd put that question to the Palestinian side as well. Sure. Okay. For the sake of argument, let's say you had a right to wage jihad, but the way you fight it matters. Tell me how they fight it.

Well, they fight it by desiring maximal death among their enemies and encouraging maximal death on their own side. Very early in the conflict, I was speaking to one of the people in Gaza who was an IDF responsible for clearing the houses of weaponry and also trying to find tunnel entrances. And even by... This was in November or December of 2023...

The IDF had learned very early that if you went into a Garzen house or apartment, you didn't search the kitchen for weapons or you didn't search the parents' bedroom for tunnel entrances. You went straight to the children's bedroom and you'd find them there. And...

So many soldiers I've spoken to, it's the same story. You go to the children's bedroom and you overturn a cot and you find an RPG there. Or you go to the children's bedroom, turn over a mattress, and that's where the tunnel entrance is. If the Garzens, I don't just say Hamas, if the Garzens wanted to protect their children, they would not do that. What they're doing is they're using their own...

as human shields, they used their own children as a means of protection because they know that there's a sort of two-for-one deal. If the IDF goes in and goes into the children's bedroom, whether the children are there or not, the world will say IDF raids child's bedroom in Gaza and the Jews lose.

And if the IDF don't go in, then, you know, the kid's bedroom remains a rocket dump. That's how they think. That's how they've always thought. And, you know, there are a lot of people who don't watch the conflict very much, who just see the headlines that say things like, you know,

Israelis attack school or Israelis bomb hospital or Israelis this about a mosque and just don't realize that the whole modus operandi of Hamas is you hide your weapons, you keep your fighters, you keep your terrorists in buildings that all the laws of war say cannot be used in this fashion. But

Hey, guess what? Hamas aren't big law of war guys. And they just use all of these laws. They break them. They use them against Israel. You know, every single rule, law of war that has been agreed on for decades, Hamas uses to its own advantage. It might be dressing as civilians among a civilian population or

whilst waging war as effectively an army. All of this they do, as I say, always with the two-for-one offer that if they succeed in killing Israelis, they succeed. And if the Israelis kill them back, they succeed. And that's the reason why the IDF, the Israeli Air Force and others have been

in such a difficult conflict because so much of the world not only doesn't understand but much of it refuses to understand that those are the terms of engagement and we we would call that out in any other situation um if the british army or the american military were involved in operation against an enemy doing this we would be encouraged to understand that but

In the case of Israel, much of the world just doesn't want to understand it. And much of it wants to condemn it. Why? No, because that's a really interesting question. The way that Hamas rigged the Gaza Strip, spent 16 years preparing the entire landscape by booby-trapping buildings, putting the tunnel entrances inside homes, the weapons under children's beds, was deliberately designed...

to put Israel in this lose-lose situation knowing that mugs around the West are going to effectively allow Hamas to gain immunity for itself by deliberately weaponizing international law. I do think they are big international law guys because they know that the unwritten rule of international law for some people is that there's nothing Israel does will ever be right. That's right, yeah. But why is that failure around the West to understand the terms of engagement that Israel is fighting against Israel? Imperfect, flawed, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

is fighting against a death cult that is deliberately, deliberately setting on fire every rule, every norm, every law that the world has held dear and simply setting fire to that architecture of international law, of law and order. I tell you, I think there's a primary cause which we should be clear about calling out, which I mentioned, which is...

I think for a lot of the world outside of Israel, a lot of the world thinks that Israel did something wrong from the start. And whatever the Palestinians, the Arabs do, somewhere deep down in the 1940s, before, since, there is some good reason for Arab discontent with Israel.

I think we have to see a lot of people. It's not a pathology. It's a grievance. Yes. And they think, well, you know, something was done wrong at the root. And if I think that that perception is wildly wrong.

more prominent and acceptable than a lot of people want to realize. Spelling it out, that Israel's creation was... A mistake. An original sin. An original sin, absolutely. An original sin. Some ideas have very long lineage. Don't they just? Don't they just?

And, you know, it was interesting, actually, when I was debating in Toronto with our friend Natasha Hausdorff last year against our mutual enemy, Mehdi Hassan, Natasha used a really brilliant analogy I hadn't heard anyone use before. She said, you know, when a couple of...

I don't know, a woman's conceived a baby and she and her husband may have a discussion about whether or not to terminate that pregnancy. And of course, there's all sorts of moral issues in that. But we recognize that that may be a discussion that a couple may have, a woman may have. But if the child is brought, if the baby is brought to term, is born, let alone is in their 70s,

You're not discussing an abortion. You're discussing murder. And Israel is in her 70s. And if part of the world still thinks that this grown-up state should be aborted, then they are talking about murder and mass murder at that. That is what they're backing. That is the side they're on.

And some people do come out and say that. Yeah, I think it should be scrapped. They never have their honesty. Yeah, I know. And in a way, one of my honesty, they never seem to have a very good plan for the orderly transportation of all the Jews. But doubtless, they are thinking about that, I'm sure, in a humane manner.

But a lot of people don't actually concede. That's what they mean. And I find this very troubling. I think that people should concede this is one of the things that happens. To use an analogy I used, you know, Pakistan was created as a nation within a year of the creation of the State of Israel. And Pakistan has been responsible for a lot more deaths in war from its founding than the State of Israel.

if you were to say, I think Pakistan has basically forsaken its right to existence and it must be abolished. I mean, you'd be like, OK, what's your plan for that? And how did you come to this decision? But you'd also be thought, by the way, to be a complete nutter and probably be expected... People would...

that you seemed to have an animus against the Pakistani people and the state of Pakistan. And you kind of have to say, yeah, because I'm looking around the world and lots of other people have done bad things, but this is a country I want to abolish. This is what is so disturbing about the annihilationist rhetoric towards Israel, because...

who will say Israel's borders were, you know, artificially imposed by the West. I mean, by the same West that created the borders of modern Syria and Iraq, and everyone accepts that that's legitimate. No one is asking to revise those. And, you

you know, other countries were born out of horrific population transfers like India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey, but there is no one who is suggesting now that Greece and Turkey should reverse their population exchange or that it should be done only unilaterally. And Israel remains, we talk about double standards, the only case where people around the West do feel quite comfortable saying there was this original sin that took place over 70 years ago and we must go back and rectify it. And I think part of...

You could even call it messianic rhetoric. It's the belief that when you rectify that mistake, you're not only fixing Israel. Somehow you're redeeming the world. You're redeeming the world, right? That's part of the projection that we find. And we'll talk about this in a little bit. But I wanted to linger just on this question of the tunnels in the children's bedrooms. That's what's especially disturbing because there is a perception sometimes that says...

Hamas are aliens who came from outer space. They are a small radical group who don't represent the Palestinians. And I wish that were true. The fact is that the way that Hamas rigged Gaza for war required a huge amount of civilian buy-in. No, I'm not saying everyone in Gaza supports Hamas. No, I'm not saying everyone is a jihadist.

But you cannot build such a massive network of tunnels, diverting so many resources, putting those tunnels inside civilian facilities, hiding rockets in Boy Scout clubs and hospitals without a massive degree of buy-in from a population that agrees with Hamas's ideology.

the same ideology held by many in the West. The state of Israel is illegitimate. Violence in the pursuit of its destruction is not only morally permissible, it is somehow redemptive. There is nothing that we can do wrong. They are forcing us to do wrong. And that is what makes this conflict all the more disturbing for me when we deal with the question of evil and death cults. Because it's not just about removing a death cult from power.

It's about a much wider social problem and needing to deal seriously with the question of the de-radicalization of Palestinian society. And I wonder from what you've seen in Gaza, how wide you think that death cult problem is. Do you limit it to Hamas or do you cast your net a little bit wider? I think it has to be wider. I think it has to be. I mean, let's just take the... Let's just take the...

testimony of Israeli hostages who've been returned. It's extremely hard to find a hostage who's come back from Gaza who has a story of any Gazan being kind to them. The population of Gaza seems, by all evidence, including video evidence, seems to have been overwhelmingly supportive of Hamas's would-be genocidal actions.

Right, I mean, there are Palestinian polls asking them whether they think the October 7th massacre was a good idea despite everything that had happened since. And it took over a year into the war...

for a majority of Garstens to come to the conclusion that it was probably a bad idea after all. And even then it's because of what's happened to their society since. Not because of some moral awakening. Not because they've suddenly realized that you're water and the wave of hell. Because it has quite literally blown up in their faces. Yeah. And they... It's sort of inevitable that they might

end up having some second thoughts about some of that. But no, I mean, if you see the, you know, anyways, you have, many people watching have, if you see the video of hostages being taken into Gaza, the civilian population is overwhelmingly joyous that wounded Israeli girls are being brought to captivity. Hostages who managed in some cases to escape were returned by Gaza civilians.

There seems to be, when the offer was made some months ago to the citizens of Gaza after the death of Sinoir, to come forward and bring out hostages, and if they did so, they'd get a large cash reward and safe passage. How many times was that offer taken up? None. Zero. None. None of the people holding the hostages. Nobody did it. Now...

you might say, oh, there's endless would-be saints in Gaza who would like to do it. It's just that the situation was too dangerous. I don't think that is the only explanation at all. I think it's that overwhelmingly the civilian population of Gaza approves of the methods of Hamas and approves of the keeping of Israeli hostages. Sure, although in that particular case most of the hostages are being held by Hamas terrorists and it's

not up for civilians to decide whether to give them back. Although we do know that some hostages were held in civilian homes. But I wonder specifically... A move between civilian homes and tunnels and so on. On the question of de-radicalization...

The Prime Minister laid out at the beginning of the war in a Wall Street Journal column the three Ds that he said are the prerequisites for peace between Israel and Gaza. You have to destroy Hamas. You have to demilitarize Gaza. But you also have to de-radicalize Palestinian society. Now, you write in your book...

There will, of course, be a commission of inquiry in Israel into how the disaster of October 7 happened. I'm not sure I agree with your, of course, or presumption that it will happen because the prime minister is trying to block one. But there must be a commission of inquiry. The difference between us and them is we take responsibility and we learn from our mistakes. But I do wonder whether there also needs to be an international commission of inquiry. We had our own conception.

We knew that Hamas was evil. We didn't want to believe how evil it was. We thought that like many other despots, they could be bought off and deterred and they wouldn't attack us. Exactly. Like many despots become corrupt.

But Hamas could not have built the terrorist empire that it built in the Gaza Strip without billions of dollars of international aid that liberated it from responsibility for the civilian population, allowed it to invest in its tunnels because the U.N. was taking care of welfare and education. And we see where that education took us because most of the October 7th monsters were in fact graduates of U.N. schools.

But it means that Hamas was able to do what it did on October 7th because the international community subsidized its war machine. And I wonder whether you think there is any prospect...

of the international community doing some introspection and understanding how that strategy has taken foreign taxpayer money and invested in a death cult because it is as stark as that. I think it would be easier to get every Jew in the world to agree to something than it would be to get the international community to take any responsibility for its role in all of this.

If you speak to politicians from Western countries about, for instance, the funding of UNRWA, they will overwhelmingly say to you, first of all, they'll deny what UNRWA did. They'll deny what various UN forces and organizations have done and their culpability in all of this. But then they will say, you know,

What else can we do? This is the mechanism through which we fund education in Gaza. What are the other options? And you would have thought, well, before you throw American taxpayer money or British taxpayer money...

into a money pot that is used to teach Gazans to kill the Jews. You ought to just try not to fund that before anything else. But their thing is always, they always say, what's the other mechanism we can use to fund these poor Palestinians in Gaza?

and I don't see any state of any likelihood of that changing. Right, there is no... I often get asked as well, what is the alternative to UNRWA? And the question is,

maybe Palestinian responsibility. Maybe instead of assuming that the UN has to teach them forever, you understand that they have a government, the Hamas government of Gaza, perfectly capable of levying taxes on goods, raising money, but it used that money in order to build tunnels instead of investing in education because you took raising the next generation of jihadists off its hands. So perhaps the answer isn't that the world should throw more money at it. The answer is that Palestinians should take some responsibility for themselves. And in that question of responsibility, Douglas,

The death cult is not just Hamas. Obviously, it's not everyone. I'm not going to generalize down to the last percentile. But there is a deep-seated problem of a jihadi ideology that has been subsidized and kept alive artificially by dumb Western taxpayers. And I wonder, do you see any prospect? I mean, are we being naive to think that de-radicalization is possible?

I think that is pretty naive, yes, certainly in the current structure. And there's two things I'd say. Firstly, there has been a misunderstanding for many years. It's existed all my adult life, which is that if the Palestinians are given another state, and I stress that, it's not they haven't got a state, they get another state.

Well, they've basically got a state in the West Bank. They've got Palestinian authority. They've got their own pseudo-ministries and things. It's basically a state. I spent plenty of time there.

It's a state in all but name. You've got Jordan. Although in name, it calls itself a state. Yeah, it calls itself a state. Exactly. I mean, not recognized by everyone as such, but it regards itself as such. Not independent, not contiguous, but the trappings thereof. Jordan is effectively a Palestinian state. Gaza was a Palestinian state. And crucially, Gaza was a Palestinian state. They were given the Gaza in 2005, and the fruits of that gift

were seen in war after war since, and then on October 7th. So the misunderstanding is if another state is awarded to the Palestinians, amazingly, of all people in the world, they just need to keep on having states, despite doing nothing to earn them and indeed turning them away when they're offered them. There's this misunderstanding that left and right...

Republicans and Democrats, Labour and Conservatives, right and left across Europe, have engaged in, which is this fundamental misunderstanding. Give the Palestinians another state and all the problems of the region and perhaps indeed of the world will be solved. Why this should be so, no one can ever explain to me.

But this is the belief. It is as a great... The belief is that the conflict is one over territory, and if you compromise by drawing a line down the middle and compromise, we both ultimately want the same thing. You're not dealing with a jihadi death cult. So we can compromise. But you see, this was... I mean, every idiot from...

David Miliband to William Hague in the UK, from Labour to Conservative, always trotted out this thing, you know, the solution to the problems in the Middle East is creation of a Palestinian state. Never again acknowledging that plenty of states already for the Palestinians. Why it should be the case that another Palestinian state would unlock, to use this term they always use, unlock all of the problems of the region is

Nobody can explain. You could have another Palestinian state ruled over by whichever corrupt or terrorist entity you wanted, and, you know, there'd still be problems in Yemen.

The Iranian revolutionary government would not suddenly become a sort of progressive, tolerant, peaceful regime just because another state had been given to the Palestinians. The economy of countries across the region that are impoverished would not boom. Egypt would be no better off. So that's the first misunderstanding. It's just this stupid idea that's demonstrably false.

that the creation of another Palestinian state would solve every other problem in the Middle East and perhaps the wider world. To use the idiot sort of slogan that's been used quite widely in America, sort of, what is it, things like, injustice anywhere means injustice everywhere, or something like this. Again, if you unlock the problem of the Palestinian statehood question,

you immediately get like less COVID in Berkeley. Right, this belief that almost all forms of oppression and all injustices are somehow cosmically linked to each other. Yes, it is something, it's an idiot idea from the American Academy of recent decades. Yeah, everything's interlinked. And so if you find, as it were, the worst injustice in the world, which is what they think the world,

the Palestinian issue is that if you solve that, then immediately everyone can get bottom surgery in California. It's basically, as far as one can discern any pattern in their beliefs, this is what they actually seem to think. You don't think you're mischaracterizing them slightly? No, I'm being infinitely generous in my analysis at the moment. But let me just get on to the second thing from that. So firstly, there's this misunderstanding about what another Palestinian state is.

But then you come to the second thing, which is that effectively there has been no plan from the international community until very recently that would solve what problem exists, which is the endless creation of death cults among Israel's neighbors. And until Trump recently started talking about clearing civilians from Gaza and encouraging civilians to leave Gaza...

move elsewhere whilst it's rebuilt. The only plan that anyone in the international community seemed to have was stop the war, spend billions of dollars and pounds and euros of foreign taxpayer money building up Gaza again, only for the Gazans to do the same thing in a couple of years' time.

I don't think anyone, I mean, having spoken to policymakers in the EU and elsewhere, I don't think anyone is that naive that they're really going to pour billions of dollars or euros of taxpayer money into Gaza reconstruction. I think that just that they think that Hamas will magically disappear and agree to cede power. I mean, what's the plan in Ukraine if you freeze the conflict with Russia?

Russian tanks poised to roll back in. What's the plan other than to hope things will go away and push the problem away? Because like evil, these are problems that we'd rather not confront. Well, you see, I'm for confronting them and I'm for trying to solve them.

So how do we solve the problem of the Hamas death cult? A really, really important thing is... Because this war has been going on for far too long and I really want it to end already. So what's Douglas Murray's idea for how we defeat the Hamas death cult? Well, the first thing is that I've said from the beginning of this conflict that the question was not, is this the fourth or fifth Gaza war conflict?

in preparation for the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th and so on. But is it the last Gaza war? Is this the third Lebanon war or the last Lebanon war? And I'm for it being the last. The last Gaza war, last Lebanon war.

I don't believe it's sustainable if you have to sustain it and you have no other choice, but it's pretty unsustainable for a country to have to have a war in the south every few years and a war in the north every decade and a half or so. To say it's suboptimal is to deeply understate things. I believe the most important thing is, and again it's something I've said

a lot through this conflict, but I reiterate, people have this misunderstanding, particularly in the West, among naive policymakers and others, that the conflict ends around the negotiating table, and I don't think it does. I think the conflict ends with Hamas losing and Israel winning, with Hezbollah losing and Israel winning, with the Iranian revolutionary government losing and Israel winning. And...

Other people might want the mullahs to win. Okay, I don't. I want Israel to win this conflict. And for that to happen, it's not enough that Hamas is defeated and its backers are defeated. They have to know that they've lost, and they have to pay a price for starting the war.

That's why, although there's much that needs to be fleshed out in Trump's plan, that's why I'm not by any means opposed to what he's suggested. I think that there's no reason why in the whole history of warfare, if a state continuously fights wars of aggression and invasion and attempted annihilation of its neighbors and keeps on losing, that it should be

Keep on getting a chance to do it again. I think they should lose. And in the case of the Palestinians, the Arabs of Gaza, that will include losing territory. And that's as it should be, to my mind. And they should know they've lost. And that's the price you pay for invading your neighbors and killing them. You don't just get to start again from the status quo ante. You don't get to just pretend you didn't do it.

and try again a few years later, you lose. And that includes losing your territory. Maybe all of it, maybe some of it. But yeah, that's the price you pay. That's the price you pay for starting a war, and that's the price you certainly should pay for losing it. Which is anathema to the consensus across so much of the world. Of course. Which is why the war would keep going if they had their way. Absolutely. Israel says that it's fighting for total victory.

And the fact that Hamas is holding hostages as insurance so that the IDF cannot fight freely is an enormous...

problem for that pursuit of victory over Hamas, quite apart from the humanitarian situation of the hostages. But there is this belief around the world that wars end when both sides are fed up of fighting instead of when one side loses, one side wins. And peace is the losing side accepting the terms of its defeat. But the world keeps saving Hamas and the Palestinians from the consequences of

of their own loss. And they shouldn't be saved from the consequences. They shouldn't be continuously saved from the consequences of their leadership turning down a state in the 1940s, turning down a state again and again the decades since. They should not keep on being saved from the consequences of their leadership paying for terrorism, rewarding terrorism, paying the families of terrorists.

They shouldn't be saved from any of this. The infantilization of the Palestinians, as you mentioned earlier, is an unbelievable thing. And it's gone on for quite long enough. And I don't believe that they are infants. I don't believe they do need the great protection of the West and everyone else to try to lead them out of this. I think that their failures, the failures of their leadership and everything should have a cost.

Douglas Murray, let's leave our conversation on death cults there now, and we'll pick up in part two of the conversation on what this means for the West and what the October 7th war has revealed about the moral state of the current West and the repercussions for the future of civilization. Douglas Murray, author of On Democracies and Death Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization.